Wednesday, May 1, 2013

New Project: Speculative Usability

Lars Söderlund and I have been working on what we are currently calling speculative usability. Combining Bruno Latour's work on ANT and his Heideggerian reading of the thing and work in speculative realism (e.g., Ian Bogost), we want to carve out a space in usability testing for more inventive, less normative approaches. That is, we want to treat usability as a thing that is always at stake in usability testing.

Abstract:

Speculative Usability calls us to attend more rigorously to the individual existences of objects, and as such it allows us to ask usability questions less exclusively wedded to the user than those posed in most usability tests. Rather than “Is the user able to quickly work this object as the designer intended?” or “Does the composition of this object satisfy the user?” we can ask, “How does this object work given its own particular set of relations?” and “How, then, might this object work otherwise?” This involves not only decentering the user as our focus, but also opening ourselves to non-normative evaluations of objects. Our goal is no longer to measure the distance between an object’s use and acceptable levels of efficiency, but to notice an object as it interacts with other objects (including the user).

1 comment:

3D printers could be a good example and one could even talk about their political potentialities: http://millenniumjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/rumpala-additive-manufacturing-as-global-remanufacturing-of-politics.pdf

about _monster

Pure_Sophist_Monster is Nathaniel Rivers, an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Louis University. _Monster teaches rhetorical theory and writing at the undergraduate and graduate levels. _Monster's areas of interest in include Rhetorical Theory, History of Rhetoric, Public Rhetorics, Composition, Professional and Technical Communication, Computers and Writing, Philosophy of Mind, and Neuroscience and Humanities. Please visit www.nathanielrivers.com for more information.

focus & direction

As this blog's title suggests, a majority of the posts will address issues of sophistry, a term we can roughly equate with rhetoric (although not unproblematically). Sophistry is a particular kind of rhetoric and most understandings of it are pejorative. The historian of rhetoric Susan Jarrett says that the sophists have historically been seen as "arch-deceptors, enemies of Truth, manipulators of language" (xi Rereading the Sophists). Viewed less pejoratively (and more productively), however, we can say that the sophists were committed to an understanding of truth and values as (culturally and situationally) contingent, and that they were invested in language as means of navigating these contingencies. For many of the sophists (a group that is hard to define through time), the human experience is defined by flux and the possibilities for transformation.

This thoroughly sophistic blogs hopes to address particular contingencies (political, historical, bodily, and environmental) and to do so genuinely and generously.

why the crow?

The image of a crow adorns this blog because of its association with a founder of ancient Greek rhetoric, Corax of Syracuse, whose name means "crow."